


Still Making His Own Maps

by AMarguerite



Series: Something Rich and Strange [2]
Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-21
Updated: 2016-02-21
Packaged: 2018-05-22 11:00:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6076863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/pseuds/AMarguerite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to "Suffer a Sea- Change." When war breaks out, Ralph gets Laurie a commission in the Navy, without much consulting Laurie on the subject. Laurie isn't terrifically thrilled-- even less so when, on their final leave before deployment, he realizes that Gareth Straike is paying court to his mother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still Making His Own Maps

The quarrel, Ralph thought, had been inevitable. He had been expecting something since Spud had turned unexpectedly moody about enlisting in the Navy. Ralph had felt the stormclouds gathering when Spud noticed something Ralph had noticed two visits ago, to wit: Reverend Gareth Straike was paying court to Lucy Odell, and Lucy Odell was very much enjoying it.

“Spuddy, stop being difficult- what other plans did you have?” Ralph asked frankly, after Spud had been needlessly bitchy about the fit of his dress uniform before the village fete. “You threw over the ROTC in that passing fit of Irish nationalism.”

“The damn button’s off my cuff,” muttered Spud. “I wish my mother hadn't had to run off to help with the flower displays.”

Ralph lit a cigarette and sat down in his usual chair in Spud’s room. It was a great struggle not to go over and fix the button hanging off of Spud’s white shirt sleeve, particularly since Spud hadn’t thought to take off either uniform coat or shirt before attempting to fix the button.

Spud unearthed needle and thread from the detritus on his desk. After a moment, Spud muttered, as if distracted by his button, “I didn't say anything about it, Ralph.”

“No, but I could see you were worrying again. Were you planning to join the RAF like Bim Taylor?”

Spud said, with a great effort at sounding less pettish than he was, “You know I can't stand Bim. His set’s as bad as Charles’s. I couldn’t believe you were friends with him when I first visited you at Cambridge.”

“Any port in a storm, my dear,” said Ralph. “Stop fussing. Let me see your sleeve.”

Spud held out his arm, but did so sulkily.

They might have subsided into one of those peaces that are not a resolution of tension so much as a deliberate ignoring of tension, when Spud burst out, “I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do, but I don’t-- you didn’t need to make the decision for me. You practically had me on board a ship before I finished reading the headline that we were at war with Germany.”

“You would’ve been a private someplace if I hadn’t done,” said Ralph. “Look, Spuddy, as it was, I traded in rather a lot of favors to get you a place--”

“I never asked you to,” said Spud, white lines of tension about his mouth. “I never asked you to, Ralph, and if you’re just going to hold that over my head--”

“I’m not trying to, my dear, and I didn’t mean to insinuate that I was--”

But Spud was in a mood. It happened frequently enough for Ralph to recognize warning signs, but not enough for him to have learnt to perfectly navigate through the storm. Batten down the hatches, he thought, grimly continuing on with needle, thread, and a sense of foreboding.

“I can’t stand being stood over and fussed at, like I’m incapable of making my own choices. It wasn’t like I’d turn Quaker and become a conchie, or fail to enlist at all--”

“What would you have prefered to do? Wait for your call-up papers and try to finish up at Oxford before being shipped out as Private Odell and spending the war in the trenches or below decks with the wrong accent?”

“I don’t know,” said Spud, nettled, “but I never _will_ know, will I? I’ll never know what I would have chosen, or what sort of mettle I have, or if I’m courageous or a coward or anything, because you always think I’m incapable of making hard choices and sweep in before I have a chance to really think about it.”

“No, Spuddy, I just think that you get into morbid moods where if you know you want something, you think you shouldn’t have it, or else wallow like Hamlet in indecision.” Ralph said it as patiently as he knew how, but there was still sharpness to it and it cut awfully at Spuddy.

Spud paled in anger, making his hair look almost red again. “You can’t keep making choices for me, Ralph. I went along with this because I knew I’d’ve enlisted anyways, and my mother would never live down the shame of it if I backed out of something so nearly settled, but I-- God!” He nearly yanked his arm out of Ralph’s grasp.

It’s his mother he’s really angry at, Ralph told himself, leaning back in his chair and tapping unconsciously, rapidly on the arm of it. He lashes out at me because he knows that he can’t lose my love. “Spuddy,” said Ralph, trying not to drown in the wave of panic that Spud was angry at him, that Spud would leave him, or hate him, “I didn’t start asking around and trying to get us posted to the same ship because I thought you would sit on the sidelines while human decency is fighting for survival. I know you better than that.”

“That isn’t the point,” he snapped.

“What is, then, Spuddy? Help me to understand.”

“It’s like when you were trying to get me to sit for Modern Languages instead of History at Oxford. You can’t live for me, Ralph, and sometimes it really seems like you’re trying to.”

“I'm just trying to help you out, Spuddy,” said Ralph. “You wouldn't have wanted to go to war with a public school education and a plummy accent and no insignia. Believe me.”

“How on earth would you know?” Spud asked, exasperated. “You may be older than me, but you hardly lived through the Great War.” He turned away to look at his fixed sleeve and caught sight of his watch. “Christ, is that the time? We’ll be late and the vicar will hrm-hrm at us for hours if we pitch up late, when we’re the whole point of the service and fete.”

Spud traveled in a cloud of ill-humor out the room and down to the church. Ralph could not penetrate or drive it off, not while they were in public and Ralph’s most persuasive arguments could not be practiced.

A sort of false pleasantness emerged when Lucy Odell met them and fussed over their dress uniforms, her eyes suspiciously bright, and slipped only when they were shaking the vicar’s hand on the way from the church to the village green, bedecked in paper lanterns and white tents.

“Laurence, it is good to see you in uniform,” said Mr. Straike, pumping his hand. “Though I should have said, ‘Lieutenant Odell.’”

Ralph had often noted that ever since first forming an interest in Lucy Odell, Mr. Straike had begun to relentlessly refer to Spud as ‘Laurence,’ even though absolutely no one else called him that. To Ralph and his school and university friends, he was eternally Spud. To his mother, family, and village friends, he was eternally Laurie. In the moments where he facetiously referred himself in the third person, Spud referred to himself as Laurie, or Odell, L.P.

Spud said something trite about service and honor.

“The Navy,” continued on Mr. Straike, with a sort of grating bonhomie, “is an unusual choice. I thought you’d be for the army, like your late uncle. But your mother did tell me _Coral Island_ was your favorite book as a child. Or was it _Treasure Island_?”

Laurie was at pains to conceal his irritation. “It was knowing Hitler had his sights on England, and would need to cross the Channel to manage it.”

“Hrm, yes,” said Mr. Straike, faintly embarrassed. He turned to Raph with an air of different embarrassment, as if he had forgotten Raph’s name.

“You remember Ralph Lanyon, reverend?” asked Lucy Odell, assuming he had. “He’s great friends with my son, Laurie.”

“Yes, our Cambridge man,” said Mr. Straike, holding out his hand to shake.

“Yes,” said Lucy, as proudly as if he were her own son. “He read Geography at Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.” She gave a little, bird-like twitter of a laugh. “Or _was_ . Now he’s a lieutenant in the Navy!” Then, while intending to tease charmingly, she more-or-less flung Spud on a landmine. “I’m sure that’s got more to do with why Laurie went into the Navy than _Treasure Island._ ”

Ralph suppressed a sigh. He’d have the devil of a time coaxing Laurie into better humor now.

“Let’s head down to the fete, shall we mother?” asked Spud, tightly, holding out his crooked arm in an almost spasmodic gesture.

Lucy Odell thankfully didn’t notice, or was willfully blind to it, for while they were all seated in the refreshment tent, she coyly chose a table for four, even though Cousin Olive had already gone back up to London, to help Great Uncle Edward get around after he had broken his hip. Mr. Straike sat down with them almost as soon as he arrived. Under the tablecloth, Ralph pressed his knee to Spud’s, as both a warning and a show of solidarity.

Mr. Straike was not much worse than most vicars Ralph knew, but he wasn’t much better either. He was unsubtle in his admiration of Lucy Odell, and spewed an outdated, Edwardian heartiness over them all. Spud was almost speechless with indignation, one, that someone would ever dare raise his eyes to his mother, and two, that even in the uniform he had hated not even an hour ago, he should be persistently talked down to as ‘Laurence.’ Ralph was at his most charming and pleasant, to make up for Spud’s manner, but it did not much help.

‘See how I am jollying your neurotic son out of his sulks,’ seemed to be the subtext of all Mr. Straike’s conversation. Spud did not take kindly to it. He began taking a sort of malicious pleasure in completely misunderstanding the vicar, espousing contrarian opinions that were not his own, and, in the end, absconding with his mother to help with some sort of crisis over the punch.

With a feeling of impending martyrdom, Ralph made pleasant with Mr. Straike, and sought to make his continual presence in the Odell household comprehensible. It was easier to say he had no family than to explain the coolness between his parents and himself, the formal letters he had received congratulating him on doing his duty, and letting him know he need not return home before shipping out. He made light of the war between Mr. Jepson and himself, saying only that the fencing match in the school’s production of _Hamlet_ had flung Spud and himself together, and a shared interest in antiquity and travel had bound them in friendship for years afterwards. Ralph heavily insinuated that Lucy Odell, in her infinite goodness, had taken pity on him, and Mr. Straike was well satisfied.

Ralph tried to be neutral about Mr. Straike, knowing that Lucy Odell had as much right as anyone to want a more permanent companion. Unfortunately, Mr. Straike was not neutral about Ralph. He seemed to look upon Ralph as a sort of natural ally, a fellow man who unimaginatively did his duty and Upheld Standards. Ralph could not quite keep a straight face, in any meaning of the term, while Mr. Straike intimated, in ‘hail-fellow-well- met' tones that they shared same opinions about Laurie: to wit, that he was unfortunate, fatheress boy who needed strong masculine guidance to be molded into a useful defender of Fair Britannia.

Mr. Straike did not quite approve of Raph’s former profession because it was strangely specific and success depended on the knowledge of people who didn’t speak English. Halfway through Ralph’s best party piece about his time in Tibet, Mr. Straike seemed to decide that even if Ralph had been drinking rancid yak butter and speaking mostly Tibetan out of a phrase book, he was at least bringing Decent, English Standards to savage places. To transform native knowledge into scientific terms was perhaps not as good as turning native ignorance to Church of England orthodoxy, but it was better than some of the sissy jobs young men got into nowadays.

Mention was obliquely made of Laurie’s boy’s-own-adventure goal of becoming an archeologist. Mr. Straike did not know quite what to make of this. On the one hand, it was a respectable, learned profession and quite popular when Mr. Straike was a young man and the tomb of Tutankhamen had been discoverd. On the other, it seemed to require an in-depth knowledge of paganism, actually required a suspicious degree of international cooperation, and did not much seem to advance the glory of the current empire.

Ralph, himself more a virtuous pagan than an adherent of the Plymouth Brethren or Church of England, sensed that Mr. Straike did not quite like to admit his ignorance about the actual field of archeology, and still less to admit his willingness to consult a man some thirty years his junior on a worldly matter, and thereafter rely on his judgement. Ralph cheerfully perjured himself, by pretending archeology was the most dangerous and manly profession of the twentieth century. By the time he was done, Ralph fancied Mr. Straike thought Spud certainly had the ability to live in a properly manly fashion and needed only a few gentle nudges for them to flourish.

These gentle nudges, later, were like the sort of nudges horses gave people they suspected of having sugar cubes in their pockets. Laurie remained willfully blind to them still and found it terrifically amusing.

“Have you been seducing the vicar?” asked Spud, returned to equanimity by amusement and several pints of the local bitter. “Treating him to that famous manner of yours?”

“Hardly, Spuddy,” said Ralph, in a low voice, for they were alone at their table, and quite separate from the rest of the village. “I thought you would be more familiar with my methods of seduction than _that_.”

Oblique references of this kind always appealed to the street urchin in Spud. He grinned. “Oh yes, quite. But what on earth could you and _Mr. Straike_ have to say to each other?”

“I gave him my better stories and he tried to enlist me in the good fight.”

“What an ass he is. You’re already in uniform.” This with a warm look that insinuated that Spud, for one, quite enjoyed seeing Ralph in uniform. “Though I suppose you mean the fight for the souls of his village. Or perhaps just one. Just me?”

Ralph knew careful handling was required, but he did not quite know how to proceed. He reached for his drink in such a way that his shoulder had to brush Spud’s, and that their cheeks nearly did. “Ah, so you noticed.”

“Yes. An unusual way of flirting with a woman, isn’t it, trying to be fatherly to her poor half orphaned fully grown son? Too late for him, I’m already a unsalvageable degenerate. What on earth did he ask you to try and do with me? Make me into a man of bronze and square chin?”

“Stiffen the sinews, stiffen your resolve,” agreed Ralph, then dropped his voice and leaned to whisper in Spud’s ear, “I can stiffen other things too.”

Spud blushed rosily and said, in a pleasantly scandalized voice: “You are a terrible influence, Lieutenant Lanyon.”

“Don't think you can rise to the occasion?”

But there were more congratulations to be endured, more reassurances to scatter like seeds in the field, so Ralph could not test this. Not yet, at any rate.

 

***

 

Unfortunately, Mr. Straike walked them back to the house. Why he thought Lucy Odell needed an escort when she had two new-made naval lieutenants staying with her Spud did not know, and, bunkering down in his willful ignorance, worked himself up into a horrible pet about it.

Mr. Straike was asked to stay for dinner-- Lucy Odell had had a roast cooking during the fete-- and by the end of the evening, Ralph could not believe that the other two members of the dinner party hadn’t picked up that Spud’s conversation began to consist entirely of barbed and bitchy asides. Ralph was too amused, and too fascinated, to do more than moderately blunt these pointed little comments. The more bitchy Spud was, the more perversely charmed Ralph was by him. It probably pointed to some severe psychological defect, but, thought Ralph, it would point to one so obvious it would be of no interest to an analyst.

Ralph settled in for a lonely night, resigning himself to the image of Laurie sulking before the fire, chin resting on his folded hands, with only Gyp for company. The narrow little bed at Spud’s Oxford digs rose before his mind’s eye, the way Spud always protested that having to squeeze between Ralph and the wall wasn’t a bother, really, and the way Spud never really slept until he was sprawled out on top of Ralph, limbs akimbo. Ralph’s mind started wandering towards London, to the indulgent, large featherbed he’d purchased as a treat for Spud (or more honestly, a bribe to get him to come weekend in London when Ralph was in the country). But this was dangerous; Ralph was already looking at the empty space to his left where Spud liked to tuck himself, before sleep set in, and he began to take up more of the bed than one thought humanly possible.

Much to his surprise, the door creaked open. Even though he hadn’t been expecting anything, he had hopefully left the door unlocked.

“Have everything you need?” Spud asked, for the benefit of any mothers who might be wandering on the landing.

“Now you’re here,” said Ralph, in a low, appealing voice, “yes.”

Spud locked the door behind him.

 

***

 

Spud had not been cajoled out of his mood. Ralph felt the old edge of panic return. Spud was all he had, the only person whom he loved who loved him in the manner he needed.

“Spuddy,” Ralph said, scratching lightly at the back of Spud’s neck, as Spud rested his sulky head on Ralph’s left pectoral. “What are you worrying about?”

“Hm?” He roused himself. Earlier Ralph had combed Spud’s hair into wild disorder, and his hair still fell a little into his eyes. Spud had passed the achingly wonderful zenith of his best looks, but he was still strikingly good-looking in these quiet, unguarded moments, when the habits of country-bred pleasantness had fallen aside. “Sorry, miles away. Did you want a cigarette or something?”

“Light one for me, if you’re--”

“Oh yes, of course.”

They had never been together for long enough stretches for Spud to actually be good at lighting two cigarettes at once. It always took him at least three tries and one ‘damn’ to get them both lit. Perhaps Spud might get good enough at it while they were at sea, thought Ralph, and then hoped Spud wouldn’t. Spud had enough trouble controlling his reactions. It would be better not to leave any action between them open for ambiguous interpretation by the other officers, or the ratings.

Ralph remained stretched out on the bed, one arm behind his head. Spud remained sitting, his right arm balanced on his bent right knee, leaning against the headboard.

Presently, he said, “I wish--”

“Yes?”

“Nevermind.”

Ralph took a few nervous pulls on his cigarette, before putting it aside, and pressing a kiss to the crease in Laurie’s hip.

“Ralph,” he said, with a certain, startled pleasure. “It’s not my birthday or anything. And the train’s not until the day after. Even then we’ll still be together.”

“No, but you’re worrying, and I like to see you happy,” said Ralph, remapping familiar terrain with an almost aggressive tenderness. He didn’t find great pleasure in this act, but he knew Spud liked it, and there was always a marrow-deep satisfaction that came from knowing he had sacrificed for Spud. “Come now, Spuddy, don’t be difficult. Just let me take care of you.”

“But-- Ralph that’s not-- you know I-- what I meant earlier--”

But Ralph had found his goal and Spud quickly gave up on the ambiguities of his arguments, or trying to renew the old quarrel of that afternoon. Afterwards he drowsed beside Ralph, awake enough only to nuzzle against Ralph’s side like an affectionate cat. Ralph drew him close.

“See how good it is Spud,” murmured Ralph, half-hoping Spud wouldn’t hear him. “See how good it is when you let me take care of you?”

 

***

 

When he woke, Spud was dressing, and heading downstairs to strew the divan into disorder. Ralph couldn’t tell, from the line of the bare back, or the swing of the pyjama shirt as it arced over Spud’s shoulders, if he’d driven away Spud’s mood.

“Remember Gyp,” said Ralph, fuddledly.

“Yes, yes, don’t fuss.”

Ah, he hadn’t. Ralph, starting fearfully into wakefulness, tried to reach for him.

“I’ve got to fix things up downstairs,” said Spud, quickly. “Then I’ll take Gyp on a walk. Let my mother know, will you?”

“Spuddy--”

“Oh Ralph, leave off it, will you?” It was a rare jet of irritability. Ralph instinctively retreated from it.

“What can I do, Spuddy?” Ralph found himself asking.

“I don’t know,” said Spud, with the same irritability. “See, this is just the sort of thing I meant, earlier. You don’t leave me any time to think. You have to be always fixing things. For the Lord’s sake Ralph, we aren’t actually _erastes_ and _eromenos_. You don’t need to teach me everything about life. I am capable of rational thinking on my own.”

“Alright,” said Ralph, voice brisk against the engulfing panic. “Take some time to think, then. I’ll make your excuses to your mother.” He wanted to tell Spud to take a sweater if he was going about in mufti instead of a uniform, but as this was exactly the sort of remark that would aggravate Spud’s distemper, he kept silent.

He tried to turn his face to the pillow but found himself watching Spud leave the room. Sleep did not visit him after that. Ralph had swum unexpectedly into an undertow of anxieties. He felt as he had the first semester of Cambridge, where nothing had been formally fixed up between Spud and himself. The trawler incident combined with the whole Hazell affair had made him paranoid about the difference in their ages, and yet every encounter Ralph had had with Cambridge's queer scene had made him almost maudlin with longing for Laurie Odell.

He gave up on sleeping about seven, and, after washing up and dressing, found Lucy Odell preparing bacon and beans in the kitchen.

“Good morning, Mrs. Odell,” said Ralph, moving to set the kitchen table.

“Oh, did I wake you and Laurie?”

“No,” said Ralph. “I’m accustoming myself to naval hours.”

“Laurie too?” asked Lucy Odell, looking up with surprise from her frying pan.

“He went for a long ramble with Gyp.”

Lucy Odell laughed. “Yes, that sounds more like Laurie. Thank you for setting the table, Ralph. You’re always such a help. I don’t know entirely what I shall do this fall with both you and Laurie away. I expect the squirrels will get at more of my apples and plums than I will.”

Ralph finished setting the table, and ran an uneasy hand through his hair. He normally was not nervous around Lucy Odell, but the intrusive, panicked thought ‘Spud no longer loves you over this’ kept pinging about in his head. Everyday commonplaces were difficult to haul out and deploy, when all his mental powers were bent on holding the fear at bay.

“You and Laurie have had a little lover’s quarrel, haven't you?” Lucy Odell asked, with a girlish air very similar to Laurie Odell’s when he was amusing himself by smacking innuendos into the open. Ralph did not know if her choice of vocabulary was a sort of Edwardian hint that she knew just why Ralph and Laurie had rowed, or an innocent, schoolgirl slanginess. “Laurie is so very much my child, but he is apt to turn Celtic when he gets angry about something and dig his heels in. Quite like his father.”

Ralph was surprised by this. Lucy Odell almost never referred, even obliquely, to Michael Odell. An outright allusion like this was quite unprecedented. “Nothing so bad. Spud-- that is, Laurie-- he felt I was behaving in rather a high-handed manner, arranging to have him made a naval officer before he thought to ask me to help him get it accomplished.”

“You always take such a tremendous degree of care of Laurie,” said Lucy Odell, in a rather approving fashion, as she began chopping the mushrooms. “I have always been reassured to know you did so. You know, ever since Laurie started bringing you around regularly I always think to myself, ‘I must prepare the house for my boys,’ or ‘Gyp will be so very happy to see my boys again.’ It is such a pleasant surprise, in my time of life, to gain a second son.”

Ralph was both touched and alarmed by this description.

Before he could say anything, however, Lucy continued on with the blithe tenacity that sometimes seems like ignorance: “It was hearing your mother never sent you tuck boxes, I expect, that cemented it for me.”

“Spud- that is, Laurie told you that?”

“Yes, my dear boy. Oh, he doesn't tell me everything. What boy does confide everything in his mother? I’m sure I read somewhere that Freud or one of those men think it very bad for a boy’s development if he does. But he tells me enough, and I can guess at others. He never told me this, for example, but I can tell you're one of the most important people in the world to him. He would rather die than disappoint you. He started in on this idea of becoming an archeologist so he could go with you to all the exotic places you write to him about. And he's gone into the Navy even though he gets horribly sea sick because you signed up for the Navy and got him his lieutenant’s stripes.”

Ralph felt too much to conceal it all successfully, but tried and said, “Well, I’m awfully fond of Spud. I should be glad to go with him to Egypt or someplace someday.”

“I am so very glad of it. It is good to have a bosom friend like that.”

“Rather. We shall be glad of each others’ company during blockade duty, too, I am sure.”

“I know I am glad of it.”

“Oh?”

“Because,” said Lucy, with a finicky sort of delicacy, as she slid the cut mushrooms off the board and into the pan,  “it is so good to know there is someone who loves Laurie as much as I do, stepping in to look after him where I cannot go.”

Ralph had not expected this reaction. He had assumed Lucy would act as his mother would, and cast them both forever from the paradise of her love. His mounting sense of dread had not adequately prepared him for this. He waited on in a sort of puzzled expectation, still thinking she would turn him out of the house within the next five or ten minutes.

She delicately withdrew from her previous overtness while she fried the mushrooms, and began in on a meandering speech of elliptical meanings and convoluted allusions.

“What,” Ralph asked cautiously, when she had rambled to a close, “are you hoping to hear from me, Mrs. Odell?”

“I am hoping to hear that you will take such good care of Laurie that he returns home at the end of the war,” said Lucy Odell. “Of course, you must come back with him. I might redo Laurie’s room so that the both of you can have beds, and you aren’t forever switching off with the divan downstairs. It can’t be very comfortable.”

You bring back Laurie to me, Lucy Odell seemed to say with a sort of loving pragmatism, and you have not only my blind eye, but my blessing.

Ralph’s eyes burned slightly. He had never even hoped for this.

She was not the sort of woman to hold or embrace him, but she did set the full English in front of him with an air of pleased expectation. Ralph was not particularly hungry-- the anxieties he had felt had not yet loosed their claws from what felt like the lining of his stomach-- but he tucked into the food with an eagerness sufficient to show he understood the symbolism of the gesture. He recognized that he was being given his first tuck box, and that he would receive them now forever--as long as Laurie was safe and happy.

“I am afraid Laurie thinks me rather too managing at times,” Ralph confided, haltingly. “That was the reason we rowed. It's been... Good Lord, it's been nearly six years since we first became friends. Usually we don't row. When we do-- well, it hasn't lasted this long before.”

“He needs to feel he arrived at the decision himself,” said Lucy, sitting down at the table to pour them both delicate little cups of tea. “He can be awfully wrapped up in his own ideas and perceptions. It's hard for him to see the viewpoints of other people when he's in an argumentative mood.”

Ralph drank his tea down out of a clumsy attempt attempt at reciprocation, in the language Lucy Odell had chosen for their real, unspoken conversation. “He does rather get into moods before and after rows.”

“Sulks,” Lucy Odell corrected, with almost a coy look. “He can be rather unbearable in the grip of them. One almost has to give in-- I would rather do that, at least, than see the return of the apostrophe. I always cringed when I saw a letter signed ‘O’Dell.’”

They gossiped cozily in this way until Laurie returned with Gyp. Then they talked of the fete, and what the other sons and daughters of the village were expected to go and do for good old Blighty, and whether this suited them.

Lucy allowed Spud to persuade her in one of her rare cigarettes when the conversation turned to the sorts of celebrations and farewells of the last war. Ralph wasn’t sure if this conversation, or the earlier, private one caused Lucy to remember she’d wanted to put some poppies on her brother’s grave. Ralph offered to tidy, as Spud needed to pack up his regulation duffel. Spud’s things had gone on their usual migratory pattern and been scattered throughout the house.

Ralph was very conscious of the fact that the only way to fix things was not to, and hated the paradox. He wanted things to be good between them again. He would not be difficult about anything Spud wanted, he decided, while scrubbing the frying pan with more force than the grease warranted, and spent quite half-an-hour tidying up the kitchen.

He did not wish to waste the opportunity Lucy Odell had given them, however, and went up the stairs two at a time when he was done. Spud was handling his old fencing foil with a furrowed brow and an abstracted air.

“Not quite regulation, these days,” said Ralph, lightly.

Spud forced a smile and put the foil back in his closet. “I came across it while looking for my white shirts.” Usually he would have followed this up with some comment about the duel, or some casual question that soothed the heart of Ralph’s deepest fears, like, ‘Did I blush as horribly as I thought I did, when you put your hand on my wrist?’ Today he did not, and merely took out a shirt and tucked it into his duffel.

“Spud,” he said, trying to keep the desperation from his voice. “You break me up when you look like that. What are we even rowing about?”

“The same thing we always row about,” said Spud, still busying himself with the duffel. “It always is, Ralph, you can’t deny it. Well, I suppose you will, the same way you deny being romantic, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

Ralph felt himself sliding precipitously into crisis mode, wanting to smooth over, to fold up Spud’s doubts and protests until they were too small to be seen. “Spuddy--”

“It’s not that I don’t love you,” said Spud.

“We don’t need to tell each other what we feel--”

“We bloody well do,” said Spud, so suddenly it was almost violent. “We never do. And d’you know what I feel, Ralph? I feel sometimes that I love you for who you’ve always been to me, and you love me for who you could mould me to be. It’s like you don’t trust me to take any responsibility for my life, or that you think I’ll be hurt or something when I’m not following along a path you’ve been at _such_ pains to make for me.”

Ralph felt himself turning very white. “For the Lord’s sake, Spuddy--”

“And,” Spud continued on, with a wild defiance, “it can’t be like that. Even if we were better Neoplatonians and hadn’t let the dark horse pull forward, it couldn’t.” A frisson of terror seemed to work through all of Ralph’s limbs; the desperate thought, ‘but that’s all I can give you, if you won’t accept my protection’ made his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth.

“I’m not young enough to be your _eromenous_ , and even then the two of them went to battle together. Harmodius wasn’t forever telling Aristogeiton to be careful of the swords because they’re sharp. I know I’m the younger, and the less experienced, but I’m an adult. At my age, men of lower classes have families.”

“Spud, don’t,” said Ralph, speaking out a fear more intense than any he’d known outside of the brig of the trawler, back when he was young and innocent and optimistic (or, relatively more optimistic). He tried to reach out to Spud-- a touch on the arm or the hand or the shoulder, but Spud had learnt a lesson or two from Lucy Odell, ones he probably hadn’t realized he’d learnt, on how to withhold and dole out love as a system of punishment and reward. To be fair to Spud, thought Ralph, as Spud moved away to fuss with cigarettes and matchbook, Spud never intentionally did it. He never realized he was doing it, and it always happened in moments when he was displeased with himself, as if he had early on learnt this was the proper way to punish oneself.

“If only you’d trust me.”

Spud shook out the match. “I’m asking you to do the same, Ralph.”

“I do trust you Spuddy--”

“Not to live on my own.”

Ralph sank down into a chair. He wished they were at his digs in London, or at Spud’s in Oxford. He badly wanted a drink.

Spud relented. “I didn’t mean it like that.” He didn’t drop to the rug, as usual, but perched on the arm of Ralph’s chair. “We’re on the same ship in the Channel. We’re going into battle together. I wouldn’t--”

In a rare reversal of their usual roles, Ralph turned and buried his face in Spud’s lap. Spud placed a hand on the back of Ralph’s head, moulding his hand to the curve of Ralph’s skull. There was an exasperated quality to the touch; the hand lay heavy on the back of Ralph’s head, when Spud would usually have let the strands of Ralph’s fine, fair hair slide through his spread fingers.

“I wouldn’t,” said Spud, firmly. “But you’ve got to let me think things through for myself, even if it seems like I’m bloody slow about it, or will burn my hand touching the stove or something.”

“It’s not the way I’m made.” Ralph tried, however. He had agreed within himself to do anything Spud wanted. “Spuddy, I’ll-- of course I won’t be difficult, if this is how you feel about it, but I-- you have no idea Spud. You have no idea how bad it can be. I never want you to know.”

There were moments when Spud could be terrifyingly perceptive. He began to stroke Ralph’s hair in the usual way, which relieved Ralph more than he could express. “How do you know that Ralph? I can’t imagine some of the parties you were shanghai’d to in Cambridge were very different from the ones Charles Fortescue threw. I didn’t care for them, but they’re hardly as bad as you’re making them out to be.”

Ralph realized, with a sense of horrible pleasure in the pain of it, that this was what Spud really wanted: to peer into the dark places of Ralph’s soul, to see all the things Ralph kept carefully hidden away from him. The sort of protective inequality that had hitherto existed between them could not last. There was a bleak satisfaction in the surrender to this new and tentative pact between equals. “No, Spud. I knew before all that. When I was working my passage back to England from Iceland.”

The hand on his head stilled. “Ralph, you never told me.”

“It’s not something I like to remember myself, let alone say out loud,” said Ralph, hearing and hating the sharp note in his voice. “Wrong accent for belowdecks, among other things. The first mate wanted me to be obliging, even when I didn’t want to and it got-- God Spud, it got bloody awful.”

“Ralph,” said Spud, with surprised gentleness. “Oh Ralph, my dear--”

“That is why,” Ralph continued on, determined to carry his point while Spud was in an amenable mood, “I was so damn set on getting you onto a ship as a lieutenant with me. I won’t have that sort of thing ever happen to you Spuddy.”

Spud gently squeezed the back of Ralph’s neck. “God Ralph, I hadn’t known. I wouldn’t have cut up so rough with you if I had.”

“I’ll-- I’ll be more honest with you, in future. It...” He cleared his throat. This was more difficult to say than to think. “You’re all I have, Spuddy. I can’t bear to think of being without you.”

“I can handle things like this,” said Spud, gently. “You mustn’t keep going about thinking there’s any part of you I won’t love.”

For some thirty seconds, Ralph was incapable of speech. He curled into Spud with a desperation Spud at last understood. “Uncharted territory here,” said Ralph. There were no precendents for what Spud wanted of him, no Socratic dialogues to study.

“We’re still in our old professions, aren’t we?” asked Spud, with great kindness. “I was thinking this was a rather un-excavated dig. Thank God, Ralph, that we’re now in the same one, and you have always been good at making your own maps.”

  



End file.
